Llewellynâ€”s â€”Special Topics in Astrologyâ€” series has been doing a good job on covering just what its title suggests, and this effort by their longtime astrology acquisitions editor is definitely one of them.

One of the more daunting aspects of astrology for the would-be student is the thought of having to learn the meaning of every single planet, in every sign, every house, and every possible aspect. Even if youâ€”re keeping your numbers simple, that would be over 10,000 combinations. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff, cut to the chase, just find a door into all this complexity?

The most obvious way should be to look at the whole gestalt first and then chase the details that suggest themselves from there. See what the overall pattern looks like, then address its relevant parts. Strange to say, there are precious few books on how to do that well — really only two, one by Marc Edmund Jones and the other by Robert Jansky — so itâ€”s nice to see another new one which includes the older observations plus a compendium of more recent ones garnered elsewhere.

When you look at a horoscope with its planets all laid out in a circle, you are usually struck at once by its pattern. Everything is on one side, or maybe thereâ€”s two bunches opposite each other, or perhaps a single planet sticks out all by itself, or theyâ€”re just all over the place. The meanings of these different natural clusterings was originally delineated by early 20th century astrologer Marc Edmund Jones, which is why they have come to be called â€”Jones Patterns,â€” and later further refined by Robert Jansky in the 1970s. Most astrologers are familiar with the Jones terminology of chart types: bundle, bucket, bowl, locomotive, see-saw, splay, and splash, each describing a separate overall personality type, especially characterized by the dominant planet involved. Jansky further dissected the approach by associating the types with the nearest or most likely aspects involved in each, hence â€”aspect patterns.â€”